Agreguesi i feed

The Federal Communications Commission is letting Verizon lock phones to its network for longer periods, eliminating a requirement to unlock handsets 60 days after they are activated on its network. From a report: The change will make it harder for people to switch from Verizon to other carriers. The FCC today granted Verizon's petition for a waiver of the 60-day unlocking requirement. While the waiver is in effect, Verizon only has to comply with the CTIA trade group's voluntary unlocking policy. The CTIA policy calls for unlocking prepaid mobile devices one year after activation, while devices on postpaid plans can be unlocked after a contract, device financing plan, or early termination fee is paid. Unlocking a phone allows it to be used on another carrier's network. While Verizon was previously required to unlock phones automatically after 60 days, the CTIA code says carriers only have to unlock phones "upon request" from consumers. The FCC said the Verizon waiver will remain in effect until the agency "decides on an appropriate industry-wide approach for the unlocking of handsets."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I, too, have (or as you can probably guess from the title of this post, had) a Facebook account. I only ever used it for two purposes.

1. Finding out what friends I rarely see are doing
2. Getting invites to events

Facebook has over the years made usage #1 pretty much impossible. My feed contains approximately 1% posts by my friends and 99% ads for image meme "humor" groups whose expected amusement value seems to be approximately the same as punching yourself in the groin.

Still, every now and then I get a glimpse of a post by the people I actively chose to follow. Specifically a friend was pondering about the behaviour of people who do happy birthday posts on profiles of deceased people. Like, if you have not kept up with someone enough to know that they are dead, why would you feel the need to post congratulations on their profile pages.

I wrote a reply which is replicated below. It is not accurate as it is a translation and I no longer have access to the original post.

Some of these might come via recommendations by AI assistants. Maybe in the future AI bots from people who themselves are dead carry on posting birthday congratulations on profiles of other dead people. A sort of a social media for the deceased, if you will.

Roughly one minute later my account was suspended. Let that be a lesson to you all. Do not mention the Dead Internet Theory, for doing so threatens Facebook's ad revenue and is thus taboo. (A more probable explanation is that using the word "death" is prohibited by itself regardless of context, leading to idiotic phrasing in the style of "Person X was born on [date] and d!ed [other date]" that you see all over IG, FB and YT nowadays.)

Apparently to reactivate the account I would need to prove that "[I am] a human being". That might be a tall order given that there are days when I doubt that myself.

The reactivation service is designed in the usual deceptive way where it does not tell you all the things you need to do in advance. Instead it bounces you from one task to another in the hopes that sunk cost fallacy makes you submit to ever more egregious demands. I got out when they demanded a full video selfie where I look around different directions. You can make up your own theories as to why Meta, a known advocate for generative AI and all that garbage, would want a high resolution scans of people's faces. I mean, surely they would not use it for AI training without paying a single cent for usage rights to the original model. Right? Right?

The suspension email ends with this ultimatum.

If you think we suspended your account by mistake, you have 180 days to appeal our decision. If you miss this deadline your account will be permanently disabled.

Well, mr Zuckerberg, my response is the following:

Close it! Delete it! Burn it down to the ground! I'd do it myself this very moment, but I can't delete the account without reactivating it first.

Let it also be noted that this post is a much better way of proving that I am a human being than some video selfie thing that could be trivially faked with genAI.

America's largest power-grid operator, PJM, which delivers electricity to 67 million people across a 13-state region from New Jersey to Kentucky, is approaching a supply crisis as AI data centers in Northern Virginia's "Data Center Alley" consume electricity at an unprecedented rate. The nonprofit expects demand to grow by 4.8% annually over the next decade. Mark Christie, former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said the reliability risk that was once "on the horizon" is now "across the street." Dominion Energy, the utility serving parts of Virginia, has received requests from data-center developers requiring more than 40 gigawatts of electricity -- roughly twice its Virginia network capacity at the end of 2024. Older power plants are going out of service faster than new ones can be built, and the grid could max out during periods of high demand, forcing rolling blackouts during heat waves or deep freezes. In November, efforts to establish new rules for data centers stalled when PJM, tech companies, power suppliers and utilities couldn't agree on a plan. Monitoring Analytics, the firm that oversees the market, warned that unless data centers bring their own power supply, "PJM will be in the position of allocating blackouts rather than ensuring reliability."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Datacenter proxies are simply IP addresses hosted in commercial data centers. No mystery there. They sit on cloud and hosting infrastructure that Linux security teams already monitor every day, often without labeling it as such.

Domain enumeration is a foundational defensive activity because security teams cannot protect assets they do not know exist. In modern Linux-based environments, organizations often accumulate more domains and subdomains than expected through cloud adoption, third-party services, temporary projects, and legacy infrastructure. These assets introduce risk quietly, especially when ownership and intent are no longer clear.